


The Marketplace of Dreams (Waters and the Wild Overdub)

by qwerty



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: F/F, Future Fic, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-30
Updated: 2011-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-18 20:12:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/192834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwerty/pseuds/qwerty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One woman walks, away and alone, and leaves dreams behind her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Marketplace of Dreams (Waters and the Wild Overdub)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [such_heights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/such_heights/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Remember Me As A Time Of Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15892) by [such_heights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/such_heights/pseuds/such_heights). 



Above you, the sky is illuminated in fading reds and golds, cooling into violet and indigo. The green grass and earth is soft beneath your feet, even through your thick walking boots. The trees around you murmur softly to each other, keeping their secrets from you.

You chose to walk away, walk alone. The silence is comfort, the stillness strength.

Cresting a hill at eventide you come upon a shadowed valley as the druids promised you would. There is a market there, where they trade in dreams and nightmares, pasts and futures, hopes and tears. There you seek a weapon, a boy grown to bitter manhood, and an end to dreaming.

The stalls are shadowy, half-seen things, their signs too bright and too wavering, as though seen through a veil of water. Small, oddly-formed creatures follow you as you walk, tug at your sleeves, your cloak, begging for attention; indefinable merchants call their wares in chittering, growling, hissing, clarion voices, holding out tempting objects, bowing as you pass. "What will you have, mistress, what can we offer?"

"A warm velvet cloak, fit for a queen!" "A cup of cool wine to quench your thirst?" "A silver circlet for your lovely hair, a jewelled blade to slide between your true love's ribs--"

You brush aside the grasping, clinging hands, not finding what you came for until you catch someone's eye, and he stands, turning in your memory from that lost, sick child, to the angry, determined boy, and now... this.

"I've been waiting for you," Mordred says, probing-- he would have said it in your mind, if he could, but you keep yourself silent and apart, behind your shields.

One of the merchants - whiskered, goat-eyed - catches your hand in soft paws and presses a ripe, red apple into it, saying, "Taste it, mistress, our finest fruits for your delectation, all yours," and Mordred tells you, "Don't,"

and you lift the apple to your lips and bite into it, feel the rush of juice flood your mouth and spill down your chin. How sweet, like memory--

You were a babe in the nursery, crying for your mother, and your father told you only that she had gone where you could not follow;

You were a child in a strange castle, crying for your father, and the King told you only that he had gone, and you had to stay;

You were a girl in her room, railing against cruelty and injustice, and your dearest friend for whom you railed told you only to bear it;

You were a woman on the cold stone floor, dying of poison for a man you thought understood you;

and then you were a queen, and your late-found sister who had stood by you through it all lay silent and still.

Away and alone is the only certainty and all that you can trust. You had forgotten that.

Then, that forgotten autumn, Gwen had come to you alone, away from the others and alone, pleading for the dreams you shared as girls, and you forgot. For her, you forgot destiny and purpose. You forgot guilt and blame, forgot that you had betrayed her and that she had betrayed you, and you stole three days from your dreams of the future to walk with her in a dream of the present.

She became all your world, your sun and moon and stars, and you became hers, and it was like returning to a girlhood you had forgotten, realising a long-lost dream you never knew you had.

Three nights and three days you stole from reality together, walking over hills and through woodlands, running barefoot through grassy fields like girls and picking berries and fruit that you shared and giggled over, drunk on sweet juice and each other, fingers and lips stained with red and purple, bodies tangled together beneath your cloaks against the cold world outside.

The apple, how sweet-- "How is it, mistress?" asks the merchant, clutching her sleeve. "We have plums, peaches, pears, the sweetest figs, clementines, fruits from lands across the seas the like of which you have never seen--"

Dreams always end; you always wake. This is the one true gift your sister left you: that no dream will ever trap you in its web, and you will never lose yourself without escape. So you woke, when the time came and Gwen was found, and hiding away, watched as your brother and his man took her away from you. You were alone again, and it was time to walk away.

"Mistress?" asks the merchant." You drop the apple. "Does it not please you? What would you rather have?"

"Nothing," you say. You have already tasted the choicest fruits they can imagine on Gwen's fingers, and even in memory they are bitter to your tongue.

"My Lady?" Mordred says. There is something about his eyes and the set of his mouth that you might have recognised, but no longer care to see.

"All is prepared, as we agreed. Stand ready and wait at the place of which we spoke, and we will have an end."

"I will," he says, and you leave them, the man, the goblin and the market, to walk into the darkness alone.

(Somewhere in the home you left behind, amidst the dreams you forsook, somewhere, Gwen is weeping. You do not know this; you did not dream this, did not look... are not looking. They are your past, and your eyes are fixed on the future.)

You walk on. Time passes. Dreams come and go. You walk on.

Your cloak does little to shelter you from the moist pre-dawn chill. Once it was a good cloak, warm and soft, but now it is old and worn thin, frayed at the edges like your tangled, ragged hair. The mist breathes dew softly on you as light bleeds into the horizon. You are a blade of grass, shivering in the open field, alone.

You chose to walk away, walk alone. The silence is comfort, the stillness strength.


End file.
